Russian Official Says Beslan Rebels Were Addicts

By C. J. CHIVERS

Published: October 18, 2004

Forensic analysis of the remains of 31 militants who seized a public school in Beslan last month has determined that all of them were dependent on drugs, a senior law enforcement official said in a statement reported Sunday by Russian news agencies.

The official, Nikolai Shepel, the deputy prosecutor general of Russia's southern federal district, also said blood tests had found very high levels of heroin and morphine among a majority of the attackers who died as the siege ended, ''which indicates that they were long-term drug addicts and had been using drugs permanently while preparing for the terrorist attack,'' according to the Interfax wire service.

''These conclusions help us look at the Beslan tragedy from a new angle,'' he said.

The statement was not the first of its kind here. As terror attacks have emanated in recent years from the war in Chechnya, many Russian law enforcement officials and politicians have said those who plan the attacks use hard drugs to coerce suicide bombers or to induce in the bombers a semi-alert state that assists them in fulfilling their grim assignments. Pro-separatist Web sites have dismissed the claims as Russian propaganda.

In an interview last year with the newspaper Vremya Novostei, Akhmad Kadyrov, who later became the president of Chechnya, said that suicide bombers were people ''filled with various psychotropic drugs.'' (Mr. Kadyrov was assassinated in a bomb blast this year.)

Such claims have typically been used to explain the condition of female bombers with tactically simple missions -- carrying a bomb into a crowd and depressing a button to detonate it -- and not to describe experienced guerrillas, who perform more complicated and long-running tasks.

The hostage-takers in Beslan were said by survivors and Russian authorities alike to have demonstrated proficiency in several military skills, including scouting their target, swiftly rigging bombs into a network that could be detonated electrically and organizing a defense against assault. Mr. Shepel said Sunday that some of them were now believed to have been suffering from withdrawal during the siege.

Further details of Mr. Shepel's statement and of the forensic analysis behind it were not available on Sunday.